{"id":564,"date":"2009-09-18T23:19:08","date_gmt":"2009-09-19T07:19:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ralphnordstromphotography.com\/wordpress\/2009\/09\/18\/a-new-lightroom-technique\/"},"modified":"2018-09-09T18:50:03","modified_gmt":"2018-09-10T02:50:03","slug":"a-new-lightroom-technique","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ralphnordstromphotography.com\/wordpress\/2009\/09\/18\/a-new-lightroom-technique\/","title":{"rendered":"A New Lightroom Technique"},"content":{"rendered":"

I love the time in the morning when the eastern sky just begins to show the first hint of the dawn.\u00a0 The world goes through an amazing transformation up until the sun peeks over the horizon and begins its march across the sky.<\/p>\n

My camera and I are very active during that time but I have precious little to show for all the gigabytes of images we\u2019ve captured.\u00a0 That\u2019s not to say I haven\u2019t tried really hard.\u00a0 But none have turned out to my satisfaction.\u00a0 They all seem so heavy-handed and certainly don\u2019t capture the serenity of the moment.<\/p>\n

Well, I had an idea today.\u00a0 It goes back to something I experimented with a couple of years ago and couldn\u2019t get to work.\u00a0 The basic idea is to work in black and white first and later restore the color.\u00a0 The thought behind this is to get the tonalities right first without the distraction of color.<\/p>\n

What I am about to describe is done in Lightroom and doesn\u2019t use any of the local adjustment features of LR 2.<\/p>\n

So, my first approach was to set the image to Grayscale in the Treatment area of the Basic control group in LR.\u00a0 I wasn\u2019t after anything fancy here, just to get the image into BW.\u00a0 Next I adjusted tonality \u2013 black point, white point, contrast, etc.\u00a0 In this step I was after a good looking BW image.\u00a0 Next, back in the Treatment area I set the image back to color.\u00a0 What I found was the color image was WAY over saturated.\u00a0 Later I learned that was because I was working in RGB and not Lab.\u00a0 So I tried Lab but never really got the hang if it.<\/p>\n

Then today I had an idea.\u00a0 I was working on an early morning photo from last month\u2019s Grand Canyon trip and wasn\u2019t happy with the way this one was turning out either.\u00a0 So I fired up LR again and selected the image I had been working on.\u00a0 Let me walk you through the process.\u00a0 It\u2019s the same idea but executed in a much more controlled manner.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the starting image.\u00a0 Actually, due to the extreme dynamic range, this is an HDR image.\u00a0 But this was the starting point.\u00a0 There\u2019s lots of atmosphere in this image.\u00a0 And a lot of blue.\u00a0 You would expect it to be cool because the main source of light is the blue sky.\u00a0 I like the sense of atmosphere but I\u2019d like to moderate the blue, bring some warmth into the rocks and maybe a little more definition to the cliffs in the middle ground. \"_A1P1372_0_1_fused-1\"<\/a> The first step is to render the image to black and white.\u00a0 But instead of using the Grayscale feature, I turned to the HSL control.\u00a0 You can render colors in gray scale by reducing their saturation.\u00a0 So I selected Saturation and set the slider for each color to zero.\u00a0 The result is a BW image.<\/p>\n

\"_A1P1372_0_1_fused-2\"<\/a> It looks good this way.\u00a0 There is still lots of atmosphere in the distant haze.\u00a0 But I\u2019d like to try to get a little more contrast in the middle ground cliffs without loosing the hazy feeling.\u00a0 And I\u2019d like to open up the dark area in the center and bottom a bit.\u00a0 A little playing around with the Basic controls yielded the\u00a0 following.<\/p>\n

\"_A1P1372_0_1_fused-3\"<\/a> In this example the differences are pretty subtle but can be seen when you enlarge the two images.<\/p>\n

The next step is to reintroduce color by increasing the saturation one color at a time.\u00a0 The nice thing about this process is that it turns out to be easier to add color than to try to take it away.\u00a0 You can always add a little of one color, them some of another and jump back and forth until you get close to the effect you want.\u00a0 So after a few minutes this is what emerged.<\/p>\n

\"_A1P1372_0_1_fused-4\"<\/a>The image is still cool but it\u2019s not the overwhelming blue of the original.\u00a0 The foreground has a lot more detail and is much more to my liking.\u00a0 The middle ground has a bit more definition because of the adjustments in the tonality we made in the last step and the reduced intensity of the blue.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s still too blue.\u00a0 The image would be strengthened if there were some contrasting colors.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t have to slap you in the face; there just needs to be some soft oranges and yellows to complement the blues.\u00a0 This will add a lot of visual interest to the image.\u00a0 To do that I turned to Color Temperature.\u00a0 Increasing the color temperature (shifting the color balance to the yellow) produced this image.<\/p>\n

\"_A1P1372_0_1_fused-5\"<\/a>This change produced a very pleasant surprise.\u00a0 By adding yellow the spire in the center of he picture separated itself from the blue background and the image became much\u00a0 more three dimensional.\u00a0 The effect is subtle but very real.<\/p>\n

One final change is needed.\u00a0 The sky in the upper left hand corner is very close to being blown out and very distracting.\u00a0 I tried several things to darken it, desaturate it and the like.\u00a0 I considered waiting until I got the image into Photoshop to deal with it.\u00a0 But then I decided to crop it out.\u00a0 The sky isn\u2019t needed to make this image work.\u00a0 It\u2019s really the rows of receding ridges reaching above the blue haze that gives this image its impact.\u00a0 So out came the crop tool.<\/p>\n

\"_A1P1372_0_1_fused-6\"<\/a> This is much more pleasant than what I\u2019ve been able to come up with over the past several weeks.\u00a0 I\u2019ll sleep on this and return to it another day.\u00a0 I find that I get caught up in what I\u2019m trying to do and when I see it a day or two later I often wonder what I was thinking.\u00a0 So there may be some more adjustments in Lightroom but it\u2019s very close to being ready to import into Photoshop for the fine tuning.<\/p>\n

To make the before and after comparison easier, here they are side-by-side.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\"_A1P1372_0_1_fused-1\"<\/a><\/td>\n\"_A1P1372_0_1_fused-6\"<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

We conduct photography workshops.\u00a0 Click here to check them\u00a0 out<\/a>.<\/p>\n

To see more of my work visit http:\/\/RalphNordstromPhotography.com<\/a><\/p>\n

Finally, we invite you to join us on Facebook and become a fan<\/a>.<\/p>\n

(676)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Explains a Lightroom technique for dealing with difficult lighting conditions, especially with those associated with dawn and twilight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-564","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-how-to-articles"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9Nl7-96","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ralphnordstromphotography.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/564","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ralphnordstromphotography.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ralphnordstromphotography.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ralphnordstromphotography.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ralphnordstromphotography.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=564"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/ralphnordstromphotography.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/564\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3897,"href":"https:\/\/ralphnordstromphotography.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/564\/revisions\/3897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ralphnordstromphotography.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=564"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ralphnordstromphotography.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=564"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ralphnordstromphotography.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=564"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}